12 Links Today

Cinema Blend 50 Shades of Grey might go with Alexander Skarsgård (and a new screenplay)  now that it lost its leading man. Skarsgård has to be anxious for True Blood to wrap given the movie offers coming his way.
Ultra Culture the exhaustive list of Xavier Dolan's credits... in his own movies.
Xavier Dolan ...oh and he's started film #5
Pajiba has an awesome take down of the recent resurgence of "boohoo it's hard to do female characters" quotes and articles -- I can't even with those comments from the animators of Frozen!

Popcorn Taxi Tom Hiddleston doing Owen Wilson doing Loki. wtf? (and also LOL)
Coming Soon Netflix has ordered a new family secrets thriller series from the creators of Damages
Variety Paul Rudd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are said to be Marvel's top choices for upcoming superhero flick Ant-Man
Variety Weird. Susan Sarandon and Eva Amurri may star in a mother/daughter sitcom. I can't say I predicted a sitcom for Sarandon and isn't "Mom" already on TV?
i09 the weirdest vampire movies ever made
The Playlist new images and clip from 12 Years a Slave 
MNPP 250 words or less on Captain Phillips 

my favorite Best Actress win of the 1970sFinally...
Movie Mezzanine seemingly asked everyone but me to compile their "top ten" of the 1970s without commentary. I dont know why lists without commentary are fun to read but they are. It's fun to see which movies dominated their massive roundup (The Godfather is the expected winner, topping 6 lists and it's nearest rivals - more interesting -- are tied for 3 #1 ranks each:Annie Hall, Days of Heaven and Taxi Driver). I've already done this particular top ten in an earlier post but if I were to redo it it'd maybe look like so. And weirdly no one they polled had my #1 as #1 though it appears on a few lists. 

1) Manhattan 2) Nashville 3) Cabaret 4) Apocalypse Now
5) Network 6) All That Jazz 7) Carrie 8) Taxi Driver 9) Annie Hall
10) Dog Day Afternoon 11) Cries and Whispers 12) The Conversation
13) Three Women 14) Jaws 15) The Godfather 16) The Way We Were
17) Klute 18) McCabe and Mrs Miller 19) Star Wars
and 20) Grease (for the nostalgia. shut it)

Okay I cheated with a top twenty but the astonishing thing about that decade is that everyone's lists look completely reasonable because great films can be seen wherever you choose to look in your 70s film education. You know? 

Exit Music
How about a little "Chopsticks" with Oscar bound (again) mega-stars Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock? So crazy that today's new adults (Happy 18th, 1995 babies!) were born into a world where Hanks and Bullock were ruling the box office and today here we are again. Talk about legs (and I don't mean Bullock's literal ones but wow those gams)

The many faces of Tom Hanks

It’s Tim, here on the eve of Captain Phillips getting released for all the world to enjoy, to ponder the career of its star Tom Hanks. For this movie (and Saving Mr. Banks later in the year, to lesser degree) represents a kind of comeback, for a movie star that never seemed like he needed one; and yet the buzzy, well-received thriller is lining up to be the first largely successful vehicle that Hanks has had in years. Larry Crowne sank without a trace; Angels & Demons impressed nobody and was hardly a “Tom Hanks movie” in the first place. And that already puts us more than half a decade in the past. An odd fate for the man who seemed so unavoidable in the ‘90s and into the ‘00s.

But anyway, 2013 is shaping up to be a big year for the actor, so what better opportunity to look back over some of the best performances of an actor who, though he always seems to regress to an everyday nice fella stock type, has boasted a bit more shading and nuance than that. These are my picks for some of Hanks’s best work – and no, you won’t see either of his Oscar-winning roles here.

Early, wacky comedies
Having made his name in the world of TV sitcoms, it’s hardly shocking that virtually all of Hanks’s big screen roles in the 1980s were an extension of the broadly amusing, family-friendly material that he’d worked with there. The best of these roles, by far, is as the adult incarnation of Josh Baskin in Big, the iconic Penny Marshall film about a preteen who wishes to grow up and does so overnight. Concepts don’t come much higher, nor comedy much less edgy, than that, and yet the film hasn’t lost an ounce of its charm despite a quarter of a century in which its goofiness could have easily been reduced to kitsch.

Almost all of its success relies on Hanks, who happily resists from playing up the most obvious elements of the part (can you imagine circa-’88 Robin Williams in the part? Yeesh). Instead, he plays the part weirdly straight, keeping a childish sense of confusion just close enough to temper the childlike wonder, and finding comedy through being honest to the character, instead of mugging.

Romantic comedies
Two of the films that paired Hanks with Meg Ryan are generally regarded as, if not “classics”, appealing time-wasters. But it’s the first and most obscure, Joe Versus the Volcano from 1990, that gets my pick as the best, and even more as the best work Hanks himself did in the trio. It’s half black comedy, half cartoon, and extensively reliant on having a rock-steady everyman in the middle to anchor its whimsies. This may in fact be the first movie to extensively and successfully trade on Hanks’s “Heck, I’m just a middle American guy like everyone else” persona, and undoubtedly my favorite of all the roles where he played that aspect up. It’s not incredibly sophisticated or probing, but it’s exactly what the film requires, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing it better.

Earnest Oscarbait
Back-to-back Oscars couldn’t translate into a third consecutive nomination for Apollo 13, but compared to the breast-beating Importance of his work in Philadelphia (he’s not even my pick for best male lead of that film, let alone that year), and the aggressively corny hero of Forrest Gump, I absolutely find his portrayal of real-life astronaut Cmdr. James Lovell to be much more rewarding, if only because it is more human-sized. The trademark Hanks friendliness is in full bloom here, leavened by the character’s prickly military background, and both come out frequently in the more domestic early part of the film, but the most impressive acting all comes after the titular vessel has entered disaster movie territory, and Hanks has to play both mortal terror for the audience and the denial of mortal terror for the other actors, and a palpable sense of loss that underlines both. Apparently, playing regular folk stressing out about being adrift in space brings out the best in all sorts of actors.

Elder statesman
I think it was Saving Private Ryan – the first of three performances for Steven Spielberg – that pushed Hanks from affable leading man to beloved cottage industry, and the movies he made in its wake have a tendency to be a bit more idiosyncratic than the ones before. Though unlike many actors hitting their “interesting work for interesting directors” phase, Hanks never moved too terribly far away from crowd-pleasers (except for the Coen brothers film The Ladykillers, one of those movies for which the word “interesting” takes on an especially euphemistic tone). The showiest of these roles, but also the most accomplished, was as the anchor of Robert Zemeckis’s one-man show Cast Away, where Hanks not only had to keep our attention for two hours virtually alone, he had to suggest his character’s gradual descent into isolation-driven madness in a way that was still fun to watch. Because Hollywood dross or not, nobody wants to see a Zemeckis/Hanks picture with a serious depiction of madness. Plus, it’s due entirely to his efforts that a volleyball has one of the most heartbreaking death scenes of the 2000s, and if that’s not terrific movie star acting, I don’t know what to call it.

So those are mine – what are your favorite Tom Hanks performances? Share with us in comments!

Yes, No, Maybe So: Saving Mr. Banks

Glenn here looking at the trailer to the long-awaited sequel to Oscar-winner Finding Neverland!

Tom Hanks as Disney and Emma Thompson as P.L.Travers in "Saving Mr Banks"

Okay, so Saving Mr. Banks isn't a sequel, but it's certainly a kin to Marc Forster's Peter Pan origin story from 2004. I wasn't a fan of that movie, but given we've recently been discussing Johnny Depp's descent into fulltime caricature, maybe we should relish Finding Neverland as one of his few roles of the last decade that didn't rely on kooky make-up and broad physical comedy. For whatever reason I'm surprised Disney didn't try and get Depp on board to play a bumbling Dick Van Dyke in this behind the Hollywood scenes feelgood drama. Instead they went with relative unknown Kris Kyer who actually has a history as a Dick Van Dyke impersonator. Whatta world! [more...]

Click to read more ...

Early Bird Oscar Predix: The "Best Actor" Chart

Guess who goes where?

Everything feels so possible at the start... the only "lockish" thing about this year's Best Actor race is that there is a crazy amount of HAIR happening. Goatees, moustaches, wigs, curls, shags, pomade, dye-jobs, fros... you name it, it's happening! 

THE BEST ACTOR CHART
Tom Hanks, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Matthew McConaughey leading the charge  

Which leading men are you rooting for? (From a distance of course. I hope you all jump ship if the performance doesn't live up to your dreams! The past few years of Oscar races have shown a disturbing amount of stubborn Team Loyalty before the films and performances were seen)

From Russia With Link

i09 the best of the new Disney/Star Wars mashup art
Vulture "Matthew McConaughey's awards campaign for Magic Mike begins now"...it's about f***in' time!
NPR on an Asian remake of Dangerous Liaisons 
MovieLine Daniel Day-Lewis doing an Eastwood in London 
/Film Tom Hanks as Walt Disney in Saving Mr Banks

Stale Popcorn Glenn, our favorite fellow fan of Burlesque, has words about the proposed Diane Warren jukebox musical. So many Oscar nominated power ballads from that one!
In Contention on the new Les Miz trailer. Why haven't I written it up, you ask? I can only write about Les Miz so often people and the movie isn't even out yet. Plus I already did a Yes No Maybe So once and my policy is not to repeat that with a single movie... I mean, some movies release five trailers, people!

Natasha VC "Ja!" 
Pajiba wonders why all the best Bond girls have the worst names. (If by worst they mean best... because those campy names are essential! They're so missed in Skyfall!)
The Mary Sue Willow and Oz reunited!!!... but on How I Met Your Mother. zzzz...
PopWatch Jennifer Lawrence on complaints that she's too well-fed for The Hunger Games

In Hollywood I'm obese.  I’m Val Kilmer in that one picture on the beach."

Ha! This make me love her so much more. 

TODAY'S MUST WATCH

I thought about writing a review of the revival of Annie on Broadway but Adam Feldman's Time Out Review is so incredibly spookily spot on on ever single point I might have made (seriously go and read it)  that it's not worth writing my own -- hate it when that happens! So Annie is in my brain currently and "Tomorrow" is the only song that's battling "I Dreamed a Dream" for earworm revival of 2012. I nabbed the video above from my friend Tom's Broadway Blog. He's always worth a read and he finds the most incredible videos. This one is the musical comedienne Christina Bianco doing various über famous divas doing Annie. They may as well cast Bianco right now in an American remake of Little Voice (1998) she's so good at impersonating other vocalists!